Concerning the sensor data based activity recognition problem， deep Convolutional Neural Network （CNN） was used to perform activity recognition on public OPPORTUNITY sensor dataset， and an improved Progressive Neural Architecture Search （PNAS） algorithm was proposed. Firstly， in the process of neural network model design， without manual selection of suitable topology， PNAS algorithm was used to design the optimal topology in order to maximize the F1 score. Secondly， a Sequential Model-Based Optimization （SMBO） strategy was used， in which the structure space was searched in the order of low complexity to high complexity， while a surrogate function was learned to guide the search of the structure space. Finally， the top 20 models with the best performance in the search process were fully trained on OPPORTUNIT dataset， and the best performing model was selected as the optimal architecture searched. The F1 score of the optimal architecture searched in this way reaches 93.08% on OPPORTUNITY dataset， which is increased by 1.34% and 1.73% respectively compared with those of the optimal architecture searched by evolutionary algorithm and DeepConvlSTM， which indicates that the proposed method can improve previously manually-designed architectures and is feasible and effective.